A help application is software that provides assistance with a hardware device or with software. Help systems for personal computers have conventionally followed a common standard and have used the same format. Auxiliary help systems such as those used in some software suites or “wizards” provide alternate methods, the latter taking users through a step-by-step solution. Furthermore, many applications default to the Internet and use hypertext markup language (HTML) pages as their documentation. The Internet affords a convenient way to keep documentation up-to-date.
Many help applications use data from both a local computer and from online sources such as the Internet. Search algorithms in help applications may use a merge process to combine results from the local computer and online sources. Conventional merge processes take online results and interleaves them with local results in a one-to-one fashion (e.g. online result, local result, next online result, next local result, etc.). This process may, however, hurt relevance because a poor local result may appear on a second position in a resulting merged list (as well as on 4th position and so on).